Cloven Hooves

by Megan Lindholm

  “I thought maybe you were just too hot to sleep, but Mom said maybe you and Tommy had had a quarrel and I should leave you alone.”

  “Too hot,” I repeat inanely. I imagine them as they must have been, all of them sitting on the wicker chairs on the screened porch, enjoying the cool of the evening, watching their crazy in-law wander around the yard in her nightgown, mooning out over the chicken yard. Shame washes through me, too deep for blushes, too sharp to cause pain as it cuts deeply in me. I find my tongue as I make my stumbling way up the steps. “Too hot to sleep that night,” I lie feebly as the screen door wheezes closed behind me. “Probably going to be another hot night tonight.”

  Steffie nods wisely. “That’s what I told Mom. I mean, I can’t imagine you and Tommy fighting. Tommy’s just too easygoing. I can’t even imagine him having an argument. Even when we were little, he always gave in and gave me my own way rather than have a fight. My dad used to hate it if we kids had fights. Used to whip Tommy something fierce if he made Ellie or me cry.” She muses back on this memory for a long minute, then shrugs. “Well, I gotta finish my own chores. See ya.” She vanishes into the entrails of the house, leaving me to wonder if Tom and I actually have any privacy at all. How far would a conversation in the kitchen carry on a clear, warm night? From the bedroom? Do they sit out here nightly, the Potters, observing us? Am I becoming paranoid?

  There is a second door into the house from the porch, and I pry it open and shoulder my way into the house. The kitchen stretches vast and white before me. There is room to slaughter an ox in there and butcher it on the table. It is that kind of a kitchen, built in the days when the kitchen was the heart of the home, a place for work and talk and growing up. The shining appliances on the back of the big counters look impotent and apologetic in this bastion of cooking from scratch. Forget Bisquick and Pillsbury here. This is a room for sacks of flour and china bowls of scrubbed white eggs, for floury hands and yeast rising. Only the cookie jar and the huge old ceramic canisters look comfortable and at home. This kitchen must have been laid out by a working woman, one who appreciated space and efficiency. I wish I could have known her, could have spent time with her here, watching the wizardry of her hands pulling loaves of bread from the oven, tucking berries into pies, rubbing butter and flour into pastry. I think we might have liked each other.

  The steps in the kitchen go down to the basement laundry room. I shovel the first load into the waiting maw of the huge white washing machine. While it is comfortably sloshing and digesting, I wander back up to the kitchen.

  The washing situation is an uncomfortable one for me. It is a weekly dilemma. Do I sit in the basement and watch the laundry slosh around? Do I sit in Mother Maurie’s unprofaned kitchen and drink coffee while my laundry sloshes below? Or do I go back to the little house, to dust and tidy industriously, and run back every twenty minutes to check on the progress of the laundry? No matter what decision I make each week, it feels like the wrong one. Like it is not what they expect me to do, and they are having to adapt around my strange behavior. But then, what do they expect of a woman who runs around the yard at night in her nightgown, and stares longingly down at the chicken yard?

  Today, I settle myself in the huge kitchen. I have a magazine from the bottom of my laundry basket, and I help myself to a cup of the strong black coffee from the shining stainless-steel dispenser that Mother Maurie keeps constantly perking. I prefer tea, but it takes a minor miracle to produce tea in that kitchen. I have only seen it done once, the first evening we arrived. When I was still a guest. Even so, the effort it took was prodigious, and Mother Maurie didn’t bother to hide what a fuss it was. First, there was the hide-and-seek game of finding the few crumbly stale tea bags in the bottom of the half-crushed Lipton box in the back of the cupboard. “No one in the family drinks tea,” Mother Maurie innocently explained. “So I just don’t buy it. Why go to the extra expense, when it’s only going to sit there for years?”

  After the tea was found, then there was a search for a small saucepan to boil the water in. There is a large and gleaming copper teakettle on the big white stove, but it is for show, not for use. Its faultlessly gleaming sides have never felt the heat of the range. The tea Mother Maurie brewed for me was black and bitter, too hot to drink, and too bitter to tame with milk. But I drank it and thanked her for it.

  I drink the coffee nowadays, black, because that’s how they all drink it, there is no small pitcher of milk or cream in the fridge, no handy sugar bowl set out for those who differ in their tastes. There is only acid black coffee in sturdy white china mugs. Or Steffie’s diet pop, Western Family Orange, the local store’s cheapest brand. She drinks it in tall glasses with much ice. She offered me one once, but I said no thank you. Now I don’t even think about sampling it. What if she counted her cans and found one missing? Would she ask who had drunk it? I don’t want to even imagine such an encounter.

  I sit at the big kitchen table with a mug of coffee and a Woman’s Day magazine, an old one from somewhere, a maverick issue that has wandered into the magazine rack in the little house. I sink into the magazine and the silence as if it were a hot bathtub. The big house is silent. If Ellie and Steffie are doing anything, it is in the mysterious upper reaches of the house, and silent. Teddy has gone off to town with Grandma and Grandpa. I have no idea where Tom is. I shut out the wondering, refuse to let it bother me. This afternoon belongs to me now. I can go home and scrub walls, or furtively read and laze about. I am soon deep into an article about what the ERA can mean to me. I hear the screen door slam and then the patter of small feet across the linoleum. “Look at me! I’m a cowboy!”

  I turn to take in this marvel. Sure enough, my Teddy is a cowboy, from boots to hat, complete with fringed tie-on chaps over his jeans and a fringe-sleeved brown shirt, a red-and-blue bandanna at his throat, and shining six-guns in plastic holsters. His face glows with joy and summer heat.

  I take a deep breath, review all my resolutions about getting along. “You certainly are,” I agree with false enthusiasm. “Except for those guns, of course. Real cowboys hardly ever needed guns. That’s only on those phony television cowboys.”

  “Yeah, they did,” he asserts, small hands aggressively fastening on the white plastic butts of his guns. “For shooting bad guys and snakes and stuff. Pow, pow!” He does a television quick draw and executes me on the spot.

  My hands are quicker than my mouth. They grab his wrists and point the gun mouths at the ceiling. “Don’t ever point a gun at Mommy, not even a toy one.” I am making every effort to keep my voice level, but the words still come out like a brutal accusation. I try to soften it. “It’s bad manners to point a gun at someone.”

  “Let go!” He wrests free of me, takes a step away, and once more levels his guns at me. “Pow! You’re dead for that!”

  “Teddy! That’s enough. You’re being silly. You know what Mommy and Daddy have said about guns. When you are big enough, you will have a real rifle, and learn to hunt. But not toy guns. Toy guns teach you bad shooting habits. Then, when you get a real gun, you have to unlearn all the bad habits before you can use it. Toy guns make you act like guns are toys. Why don’t you take those silly things off?”

  Teddy’s jaw juts out stubbornly. “NO! They’re mine. And Daddy doesn’t care if I have them. He was there when Grandpa bought them for me.”

  I bite down firmly on my tongue. What is real here, what is important, what will we all remember years from now about this? I go searching for perspective and don’t find it. A simpler thing. How can I take the toy guns from Teddy with as little hurt to Teddy as possible? Heavy footsteps coming up the porch and into the kitchen. The screen door wheezes shut, and Grandpa sets two bags of groceries down on the table.

  “Looks like the shoot-out at the OK Corral in here!” It is Tom’s dad, addressing me, sensing that something is wrong, why am I kneeling on the floor staring at Teddy, how is he going to shield his grandson from my temperamental foolishness? Tom is behind him.
He sets down two more brown paper sacks of groceries and immediately pours himself a cup of coffee. I stare at him, but he shakes out the newspaper and settles himself at the table with his coffee, a neutral in this power struggle. Does he really think he can abstain? I will change his mind about that. I deliberately ignore his father.

  “Tom, were you the one who gave Teddy toy guns? After we had agreed they were a bad idea?”

  He looks up innocently, wearily, preoccupied. I am not fooled. “What? Oh, yeah, well, by the time I found out about them, Dad had already given them to Teddy. I didn’t want to have him screaming his head off all the way home, and Dad didn’t know we’d decided against toy guns. I guess just a couple won’t hurt him. He’ll grow out of them soon enough.”

  There. All explained. He tries to get back to his paper. But I am without mercy or restraint. So let it be public then, let his father listen and watch. Let him see what problems he makes when he assumes Teddy is his to do with as he pleases.

  “Tom, we talked about this a lot. I’m surprised you can just let it go. Remember you …”

  “Why can’t the little guy have a couple of toy guns? He can’t hurt anything with them.” Tom’s father to the rescue. Why are you nagging my son, you unreasonable wench? You should be smiling and pleased that I have seen fit to favor your child with gifts.

  I take a deep breath, turn to this flank attack. “I know he can’t hurt anything with those guns. But they teach him bad habits, give him wrong ideas about guns. That’s how gun accidents happen, kids point real guns at each other, pull the trigger and say bang. And they’re so surprised when someone really dies. Toy guns make a kid think he can point a gun at something and shoot it and nothing happens. It makes killing a game. When Teddy is old enough to have a real gun, he will have to unlearn a lot of bad habits about how to carry a gun and treat it and …”

  “My kids always had toy guns. Never hurt them any. I mean, you ain’t a secret murderer, are you, Tommy?”

  Tom grins good-naturedly at this simple country jest as he reads his paper. He makes no comment. Let the old man straighten Evelyn out. He’ll tell it like it is.

  “I just don’t want Teddy to think …”

  “I don’t think kids should have real guns anyway. Not until they’re at least eighteen or so. They don’t know how to handle them, and they might hurt someone.” Steffie has materialized, to favor us with this gem of wisdom.

  “They don’t know how to handle guns because they haven’t been around them, except for toy ones that don’t do anything. I grew up around guns, Steffie. There was always a loaded one by the front door. I had my first gun, a twenty-two, when I was about ten. My dad taught me how to use it and how to care for it, and his job was a lot easier because I had never had any toy guns. I …”

  “You mean you actually killed things with it?” Steffie is aghast. Her mental images flicker on the kitchen wall. There I am, at eleven, my arms red to the elbows with the gore of countless rabbits and dicky birds, slain for no more reason than to satisfy my lusts for carnage.

  “Killing is what a gun is for, Steffie,” I point out gently, easing her into that new idea. “I kept pests out of Mom’s garden, and kept squirrels from stealing the insulation out of the attic. Later I used it to take biological specimens for a high-school project. I think …”

  “I think that’s sick!” Steffie is staring at me. “Imagine a little girl out killing animals for fun. At least toy guns …”

  Grandpa Potter cuts in. “Well, Teddy is your child, Evelyn. If that’s how you feel, that’s it. I can’t say I understand it. But you got your rights. You and Tom say no toy guns, then that’s it. I’m not the kind to interfere. But you take those six-guns away from him, not me. I don’t want to break the little guy’s heart over something I can’t even understand myself.” His kindly voice is grieved over my heartlessness. “Poor kid,” he adds.

  There’s the indictment, you rock, you stone, you heartless mother, you! I glance around for Teddy, but the object of this discussion has long since made a clean getaway. I am aware that they have all probably already noticed this and are secretly amused by it. Shall I pursue him, seize him and throw him to the ground, strip him of his cowboy guns in the dust of the front yard while hostile eyes stare at me covertly from the shelter of the kitchen windows? Shall I track him down with my killer instincts even as I once tracked small, defenseless rodents? They are watching me, waiting for me to do this awful thing to my son, so that he can run crying to them for comfort. No matter what I do, they will win.

  I am saved. The washer buzzes that it is done. I beat a hasty retreat to the laundry room to shovel wet wash into the dryer, to heap more into the washer and start the sloshing, humming machines. I am deliberately slow, taking twice as long as needed to do this simple thing. When I surface, the kitchen is empty except for an abandoned newspaper, a cigarette sending up a futile smoke signal from an ashtray.

  The anger inside me is alive, a separate growling thing inside me. It is too strong a creature to be part of the weak thing I have become. I myself am a shadow, powerless as a dream to reshape the events that are forming around me. Only my anger has any strength, roaring its defiance from the poor citadel of my body, refusing to be conquered or placated. It would like to take Tom and shake him, shake him, shake him. Where was he when I needed support, needed reinforcement as a parent and an adult in this household? He was over at the kitchen table, being a child, a son, refusing to get involved in someone else’s scolding. And I am angry at Steffie, and angry at Tom’s father. But my anger also snarls at myself, menacing me, wishing it could destroy me and find a fitter vessel. I have become so impotent. Not once did I yell or insist. I am always so reasonable, so open to logic, so malleable, so humble. I sicken myself.

  When Teddy came in, I should have simply and calmly removed the guns from him, and then explained. He is the child, I am the mother. And Tom is the father, but not today. No, today he is being Potter’s boy Tommy. I have heard him called that, in the drugstore, the hardware store. When I hand them a check, they frown over it for a moment, and then say, “Oh, you must be married to Potter’s boy Tommy.” And I must bow my head and nod, even when I want to scream out that dammit, I didn’t marry Potter’s boy Tommy, didn’t even know he existed for most of our marriage. And now that I do, I don’t even like him.

  I wonder what it would take to make Tom Potter come back to me, be a man to me again. I wonder what it would take to find my Teddy again, my little satellite who is now flung out free of my gravity and is finding others to orbit. I wonder what I have left, what holds me here. And the whole picture comes to me. We are a solar system blown apart and shattered. I no longer orbit Tom, Teddy no longer spins around my life. The desolation that engulfs me is suddenly, horribly familiar. I slam my mind shut on it.

  Forget it. Forget all of it, don’t think about it, it will probably straighten itself out. The sound of the machines is giving me a headache. Well, let them slosh and tumble on their own. They weren’t going anywhere with my laundry. I stepped out of the cool cavern of the kitchen onto the big shaded porch. Gently I shut the screen door and the wooden door beside it, closing in the sounds of my work doing itself. I step out in the harsh brightness of the backyard. This part of the yard is all sunshine and dust, tire tracks and parked pickups ticking in the sunshine, sunlight glinting off blue paint. Around the front of the house is the lawn and flower beds and three big shade trees. But no one ever lazes there, lying on prickly grass or a saggy lawn chair and reading cheap novels. That part of the yard is for show, for the customers driving past on their way to the dealership and equipment yard. Stay away from there, lest you spoil the perfect picture.

  I strike out across the dusty backyard, cutting through the heavy waves of heat like a little boat battling a storm. I walk through the dusky, musky interior of the barn and out into the cow pasture. Across the pasture, watching my feet and the languid cows for any possible hazards. They are Angus cows, black blocky t
hings living placid lives that end in plastic wrap and roasting pans. They scarcely notice me at all. Across the wide pasture and through the barbed strands. I follow the fence of the chicken yard now with the electric wire along the top of it. It is snapping in several places, singeing grasses that have dared to grow too tall and breach its keep. The chickens are scratching in the sun or dust bathing, the ducks are playing on the pond, diving and flapping to get the cool water down through their feathers to their bodies. They look up, grow silent at the sight of a human outside their pen, on the wild side of their fence. But then they return to their play and I turn my back on them and look out across the useless lands.

  The useless lands. The land too marshy for pasture or hay, land that would give foot rot, would drown seedlings, land with a wet layer of soil and bog plant and beneath it only gravelly, sandy soil. Useless land, left wild in the desert of orderliness that the valley is becoming. And beyond the useless land is no-man’s land, the land that belongs to no one and to everyone, the “govamint” land. Beyond the mushy stretch of useless land rises the rolling hills covered with birch and cottonwood, willow and alder, a scattering of madrona trees with their trunks of muted green and red. Down from those hills comes the stream, even across the useless lands I can hear the stream, and the wind blowing across the high tops of the trees like a lazy piper breathing across his pipes.

  A path crosses the useless land. I knew there would be one. I follow it carefully, carefully giving no thought to who or what made it. Sometimes it dips beneath stretches of shallow water standing on top of mud and mush. There I parallel it, leaping from tuft to tuft of tall marsh grass, getting wet no higher than my ankles. Who cares if my sneakers are soggy? It cools my feet.

  Gradually the path becomes drier, and I know the land is rising beneath me. At one moment I am walking on the useless land; the next I stand beneath the first shelter of the reaching trees, listening to the whispering stream and the call of pipes that are no longer to be denied.